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A Hott Approach to Computational Effects

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A Hott Approach to Computational Effects The College of Wooster Open Works Senior Independent Study Theses 2019 A HoTT Approach to Computational Effects Phillip A. Wells The College of Wooster, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy Part of the Theory and Algorithms Commons Recommended Citation Wells, Phillip A., "A HoTT Approach to Computational Effects" (2019). Senior Independent Study Theses. Paper 8566. This Senior Independent Study Thesis Exemplar is brought to you by Open Works, a service of The College of Wooster Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Independent Study Theses by an authorized administrator of Open Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. © Copyright 2019 Phillip A. Wells AHoTT Approach to Computational Effects Independent Study Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at The College of Wooster by Phillip A Wells The College of Wooster 2019 Advised by: Nathan Fox Abstract A computational effect is any mutation of real-world state that occurs as the result of a computation. We develop a model for describing computational effects within homotopy type theory, a branch of mathematics separate from other foundations such as set theory. Such a model allows us to describe programs as total functions over values while preserving information about the effects those programs induce. iii Contents Abstract iii 1 Introduction 1 2 Homotopy Type Theory 7 2.1 Type and Space . .8 2.1.1 Judgments . .8 2.1.2 Universes . .9 2.1.3 Functions . 10 2.1.4 Sums and Products . 13 2.1.5 Finite Types . 15 2.1.6 Dependent Types . 16 2.1.7 Dependent Product Types . 17 2.1.8 Dependent Sum Types . 17 2.2 Proof and Logic . 18 2.2.1 The Curry-Howard Correspondence . 18 2.2.2 Identity Types . 19 v vi CONTENTS 2.2.3 Propositions . 19 2.2.4 Predicate Logic . 21 2.2.5 The Univalence Axiom . 23 3 Computation 27 3.1 Formal Languages and Automata . 28 3.1.1 Regular Languages and Finite Automata . 29 3.1.2 Context-Free Languages and Pushdown Automata . 31 3.1.3 Turing Machines and Recursively Enumerable Languages 34 3.2 The Sizes of Infinity . 37 3.3 Computation in HoTT . 41 3.3.1 Turing Machines as Functions . 41 3.3.2 Another Approach: Turing Categories . 43 3.3.3 Last Thoughts . 44 4 The Coq Proof Assistant 47 4.1 Inductive Types . 47 4.2 Basic Proofs . 49 4.3 Records . 50 4.4 Functions . 52 4.5 HoTT in Coq . 53 5 Actions and Effects 55 5.1 Applications . 57 5.1.1 Identity Action . 58 5.1.2 Interactive Input . 59 5.1.3 Exception Handling . 60 6 Conclusion 63 A 3-State Busy Beaver in Coq 65 Chapter 1 Introduction A computational effect is any mutation of the state of the “real world” that occurs as a byproduct of computation. Very few programs are effect-free (pure, as they are often known); even the simple “hello, world” program takes as its objective the writing of information to some standard output. Any input/output action may be considered effect-inducing (and thus contributing to a program being impure), not to mention variable assignment, looping, or exception handling. Effects are everywhere, to put it mildly, and the study of effects has been the subject of much research for decades. Consider the following snippet of C code: 1 i n t a = add ( 2 , 3 ) ; 2 printf(”%i n” , a ) ; n Assuming these lines were written by a competent, well-meaning programmer, we expect that the integer 5 will be computed by add(), and then printed to the standard output. But what if the programmer was less than 1 2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION capable, or even malicious? The first line provides some basic information about the underlying program: add() is a function that takes two integers and returns an integer (or at least a value that can be converted to an integer). Of course, the type signature of a C function is rarely adequate to describe the behavior of the entire subroutine, so add() is free to do just about anything else it pleases, like modifying memory, accessing secret information, or firing the proverbial missiles. Functional programming is a paradigm that treats computation as a series of mathematical function applications, rather than as an explicit sequence of statements. Rather than supplying the machine with a list of instructions and an order to complete them in, a functional program expresses a function definition by specifying what the output of a computation ought to be given some input. Pure, functional programming languages are better-behaved with respect to effects. Haskell, for instance, requires the programmer to make explicit the flow of data in and out of a program [16]. The upside is that it is much harder to write programs that fail mysteriously. The following lines of code define a function that adds two integers together: 1 add : : Integer > Integer > Integer − − 2 add x y = x + y The type declaration on line 1 is the same our add() subroutine, with the guarantee that this function maps two integers to an integer and does nothing else. If we want to, say, print the output, we must pass the result off to another function written for this purpose, annotated with the expectation that the CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 3 function performs an I/O action. Programming in this way preserves the modularity of code but can be burdensome for the user. If, for instance, a program needs to display a stack trace on an error, then the state of the stack must be passed around along with all the data required to perform the requisite computations. The same goes for incrementing a counter or working with large data structures—any information required to persist must be systematically handed off like a relay baton. Eugenio Moggi’s Notions of Computation and Monads is perhaps the most famous solution to the problem of safety versus convenience [11]. The paper presents a categorical analysis of programs that include effectful behavior, and the application of Moggi’s strong monads to languages such as F# and Haskell has become the defining feature of the so-called “imperative functional programming style” [9]. While an in-depth understanding of monads in functional programming is not necessary for our purposes here, we give a brief synopsis: a monad in the programmatic sense is a collection of two operations, plus a well-defined method for constructing its elements. These operations provide a general method for creating new types out of existing values—a concept we revisit in Chapter 2—as well as the a method for composing monadic functions [16]. Because monads generalize the notion of effectful computation as something that occurs between non-monadic function applications (and therefore between the evaluation of ordinary expressions) they are sometimes referred to as “programmable semicolons.” A monad contributes to the structure of a functional program in much the same way that a semicolon contributes to the 4 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION structure of an imperative one. For all their advantages, monads are somewhat unsatisfying from a type theorist’s perspective. They prescribe a mechanism for stepping out of the functional environment when necessary, but they fail to capture the essence of computation with respect to the underlying type system. Haskell uses relatively complex structures where dependent types might be better suited. And because the Haskell compiler restricts the number of instances of a type to one, the Haskell compiler must maintain a global instance table, an unfortunate compromise for a language committed to avoiding shared mutable state [3]. Algebraic effects, introduced by Plotkin and Power in 2002, offers a more recent attempt to marry pure functional programming with computational effects. While monads tend towards the unwieldy when there are many effects to step through, algebraic effect handlers were designed precisely with large and hairy programs in mind [2]. The basic idea is to separate effect declaration, in which the context of the effect is described, from effect handling, where the semantic details are ironed out. The process is not dissimilar to that of declaring a function’s type before implementing it, with the added complication that effects are typically described as algebraic data types parameterized by values lifted from the underlying program. For example, an exception handler may exhibit different behavior when processing input/output than when doing arithmetic. Algebraic effects are a bit easier for the functional lay-programmer to adapt to, given their relatively uncomplicated name and design. Like monads, the underlying mathematics is well-developed and understood, and like CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 5 monads, algebraic effects divorce the notion of effectful computation from the surrounding type system. Programs utilizing algebraic effects have the form A B, where A and B are types and is a possible side effect. The benefit of ! this approach is that it is easy to determine which values are non-effectful (evaluating an integer will never induce an effect; evaluating an I/O handler applied to an integer is another story). Nevertheless, it would be nice to unify a theory of effects with a theory of types. The type of a program under such a model is the type of functions that map a value of type A to a value of type B or to a computational effect. Rather than treat effects as a separate entity that binds to a value, we treat effectful actions as values in and of themselves. As a simple example, consider the type of function called main, intended to replace the C function main().
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